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We must not cave in to the spookocracy in the Kremlin

Not all uplifting stories have a happy ending. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, to be followed within a couple of years by the collapse of communism in its Soviet heartland, it was as if history was intent on imitating JRR Tolkien's fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings. The Dark Tower in Moscow had fallen; the evil empire was over. The West had won.

The Russians deserved better times, too, after weary decades of Soviet tyranny but it did not come in the way we imagined. The new unfree Russia led by Vladimir Putin has some of the intransigence of the nasty old Soviet Union: it reacts to the humiliation of losing the cold war with belligerence.

This poses a real challenge for the West's present crop of leaders who have no experience of great power politics. Russia or China - where our prime minister is seeing the sights